Data and Reporting

This blog post is part of a series about Reaching Home HIFIS requirements:

1. Reaching Home: Including the right clients

2. Reaching Home: Collecting the right data (this post)

For Reaching Home communities, there are a number of reporting requirements that come attached to the program. While it’s not explicitly in your agreements that you have to put data into specific modules, it is required that you provide Housing, Infrastructure and Communities Canada (HICC) with some data. Further, there are offici…

For Reaching Home Designated Communities, a major task is to utilize HIFIS to manage client-level data and use it for Coordinated Access.

One of the components of this is to have a By-Name List / Prioritization List / Unique Identifier List that takes your data in HIFIS and converts that into a list of people that you can use to make prioritization decisions about housing resources.

Anther component of this is to be able to determine how many people are becoming homeless and how many are exiting h…

From time to time, people ask me about how a report handles bed-nights. Unless otherwise specified, a bed-night is counted if a client is booked in at exactly midnight.

That means that there is no minimum stay length. If a client books in at 11:59pm and then books out at 12:01am (2 minutes later), that counts as a bed-night.

That means that if someone books in at 1am and stays the entire rest of the night, that does not count as a bed-night.

That means if someone is there at check-in and slee…

As of April 1, 2022, Ontario communities now have new funding requirements through the HPP program. There's a lot to take in here, so many communities are rightly concerned about what this means for them. In particular, those using HIFIS are wondering how they should start recording data so that they can pull it out at the end of the year.

I'm afraid that I don't have all the answers yet, but since so many people are thinking about this right now, I thought it would be good to start a discussio…

Occasionally, I get asked by someone what is the average length of stay for families (as opposed to singles) in their shelter system. On the surface, this is an innocent question! I would like to know this. Wouldn't you like to know? If families are staying longer than singles, then maybe we can arrange some policies or programs that specifically target families more efficiently.

But it's actually really hard to calculate the average length of stay for a family. Not because the math is hard, bu…

Let me ask a question: how do you calculate chronic homelessness? We know that the federal definition is 6 months in the past year or 18 months in the past 3 years, but we have to deal with a lack of information - there's lots of holes in our data. So how do we address these gaps? Let's go through a few scenarios and discuss.

Scenario 1

Our client, Aladdin, stays in our shelter every night for six months. He books in January 1st and then books out June 30. That's 181 days, so we can calculate …

At ACRE Consulting, one of the things we do a lot of is writing reports. We see a lot of different request for reports which vary in complexity from extremely simple to crazily complex. The resulting reports end up varying wildly in measures like efficiency and run-time. Some will run quickly, while others might take ages to compile (fill with data) and might even time-out (give up before completion).

We'd like to walk you through what's going on in the background of a report so you can have a …

It's almost universally agreed that family stays in HIFIS 4 are a little problematic, especially if you compare family stays in HIFIS 4 to HIFIS 3.

There are three challenges are for day-to-day use when it comes to front line staff at family shelters, and then even bigger problems that are hiding behind the curtain when you're trying to pull data out of the database.

Occupancy

First, all of the occupancy in HIFIS 4 is bed-based as opposed to room-based. Let's imagine we have a family shelter …